PC requirements and setup. Any advice appreciated.

[cropwell]

You would be amazed at the capacity of a CNC machine to create a mess. If it is MDF based cutting then the fine dust gets EVERYWHERE. Metal is worse, as it is conductive and I have lost one motherboard this year from swarf ingress. Even with dust extraction some local filtration is a must. I would recommend one on your face to start with, then the PC should be in a case with filtered air being blown in. If you are running Mach3 and a parallel port, then a laptop is trouble because of timing issues and power saving.

I don't know about AutoCAD nowadays, but I run version R14, which is at least 20 years old, but does what I want. On a modern PC that can't be hogging too much in the way of resources.

[Lee Roberts]

If you get a small compact atom based system, say an Intel D525 (1M Cache, 1.80 GHz) based system, they don't really require additional cooling of the case they live in, filters on any intake fans/slots go along way still...

Coupled with proper machine isolation it should be a more or less non issue.

Link: Intel D525MW Intel Atom 1GB DDR3 RAM Mini ITX Bundle - £15.00